I love what SpaceX is doing and I really, really hope they succeed. I'm not sure if it's founded or not, but I fear we're at risk of losing a bit of institution

I love what SpaceX is doing and I really, really hope they succeed. I'm not sure if it's founded or not, but I fear we're at risk of losing a bit of institutional knowledge as the original crop of "rocket scientists" retire. In my mind, SpaceX is pushing the R&D process along, keeping that knowledge going and expanding it outside the traditional government-run, risk-averse space bureaucracy. I have to nit-pick about one thing in the article though: "Livingston said drugs are so profitable that pharmaceutical companies could become commercial space customers if they had routine and reliable ways to get crystallization experiments into space and back again." I have plenty of experience in the pharmaceutical industry and I have to say, if they're looking for money from this, they will be waiting a long time. This meme always makes for a nice tidy tag-line in a grant proposal for space research, but it's not really based in business reality. Protein crystal structures are certainly important in pharmaceutical development, but they rarely make or break a drug program. The problem is that protein structures obtained from crystals don't always accurately reflect what the protein does in solution. Furthermore, even if you do end up using a crystal structure to design a compound, your problem is only just beginning. The big problem with drugs is that they fail spectacularly when they get to the clinic because they have an unacceptable safety profile or they just plain don't work. The protein structure is fairly irrelevant in these cases because the rest of the biology is so maddeningly complex and unpredictable.